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Columbus Blamed For Mini Ice Age
DesScorp writes "Science News reports on a story which blames a centuries long cooling of Europe on the discovery of the new world. Scientists contend that the native depopulation and deforestation had a chilling effect on world-wide climate. 'Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.' The story notes that the pandemics in the Americas were possibly an example of human climate manipulation predating the Industrial Revolution, though isotope measurements used during research have much uncertainty, so 'that evidence isn't conclusive.'"
This is truly the most idiotic thing I've ever read.
And I've read a Creationist textbook.
If this theory is right, I think a similar effect should have occurred after the black death in Europe. Does anyone know if it got colder at that time?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Now eventually it reaches a stable phase. Trees absorb Y amount of CO2, produce leaves, leaves fall and rot, release Y amount of CO2. Trees die, but get replaced so the forest neither grows nor shrinks. I guess that's what you mean. But the carbon that went originally into making the trees is still locked up in the forest. Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.
Thus producing the OPPOSITE effect to that posited by the story.
The story speculates that forest cover increased due to depopulation of North America by diseases and weapons brought by European settlers. The resulting increase in biomass was allegedly responsible for a reduction in CO2 leading to global cooling.
The whole conjecture sounds like BS with a politically correct slant. In Europe there was an ongoing deforestation which had commenced a century or so before Columbus, and a considerable deforestation of the Americas started a century or so later. Due to the time scales of forest growth and the probable extent of any net change in forest cover, the effect on climate would have been rather limited (probably negligible).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
A lot of the trees were not simply burned: they were used as lumber. Remember that by this point there was practically no virgin forest left in all of Europe, so finding a 20-50 m tall tree to use as the mainmast of a ship was difficult. And once you'd found the main mast, you still needed tremendous amounts of lumber for the rest of the ship. Mahogany and other tropical woods were highly valued for furniture; temperate hardwoods like oak and maple had uses for barrels, crates, and floors. (It is telling that, despite huge amounts of such woods in New England, the typical home was constructed and clad with conifers - spruce, pine, and cedar - because the hardwoods were in such demand and thus expensive.)
The general effect of this activity is to consume the forests, but not in a way that released a whole lot of carbon. Some of that carbon was eventually released (fires on ships was quite common) but plenty of it was sequestered at the bottom of the ocean (sinkings were also quite common).
Previous climate change, along with continental drift, continental forest fires, and the other big changes you invoked - all happened over thousands and millions of years. The current climate change you deniers no longer bother to deny is actually in progress is happening over just a few decades and centuries. Which is totally unprecedented.
OK then. What caused the "little ice age" to begin with? Didn't it start within a few decades or centuries? If we are to assume that Europeans deforested the Americas causing an end to the little ice age, then how did it ever start since Europeans had been deforesting Europe for centuries? Shouldn't it have been warmer in 1600's than it was in the 1400's, which should have been warmer than the 1200's and then the 800's and so on? How on earth did a little ice age form in the 1800's? Also, what ended the "big ice age" about 10,000 before Columbus was ever born?
See, this is the problem with the whole AGW argument. Man spots a trend like, the climate is warming or it's raining, and then wonder what HE did to cause it. Maybe, just maybe whatever change happened with no help from man at all. Maybe that dance really didn't cause it to rain and it was going to rain whether you danced or not.
Correlation does NOT equal Causation.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Article's theory: An area the size of california was reforested over 200 years causing the little ice age
Your theory: removal of X amount of forest over 200 years should have resulted in Y amount of warming which we didn't see. We actually saw a temperature change of Z.
You need to figure out what X , Y and Z are before making that a legitimate argument. The article has real numbers and real research behind it, your speculation does not rise to the level of a rebuttal.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I live amongst them, along with millions of other people. Here in New England, the history is this: Prior to European settlement, 75% of the land was covered in trees. The Europeans showed up, cut down the forests and made farms of the land. At this point, roughly 25% of New England was forested, the other 75% was largely farms. Later, the farmers moved to the mid west and west, abandoning the farms in New England, which were a bitch to farm because of the rocky soil. The farms were abandoned and trees grew up in their place. That's why you can hike through forests in New England and find old foundations and very long lines of stone walls in the middle of nowhere. Back in the day, those forests were "somewhere." Even with our "sprawl" in New England, roughly 75% of the land is forested. I can attest to this as I live in a forested burb. Deer, turkeys, foxes, etc. routinely walk through my yard. Don't believe me? Then just pull up http://maps.google.com/ and search on New England. Then look for deforested land... if you do the visual math, you'll see that it is mostly still forested here.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
The idea that the global climate could be changed by a relative handful of europeans clearing a tiny portion of the forested landscape with handsaws and horses is ridiculous. The Oort minimum began approximately 1,000 years ago, followed by the Wolf minimum (740 years ago), the Sporer minimum (600 years ago), and then the Maunder minimum approximately 400 years ago. Columbus set sail in 1492 so those europeans would have had to have been working like beavers (pardon the expression) to have cut down enough trees by ca 1600 to drive the climate to yet another minimum. We may be at the beginning of yet another climate minimum right now, likely driven by reduced solar output. AGW proponents are turning into spin doctors with these kinds of 'theories' (such as TFA) to explain the utter failure of their climatic theories to account for the real global climate change that is in the fossil record over the last 100,000 years.